Podbit · Freakonomics Radio
AI companies have told the NYT their models still can't reliably solve Connections. The misdirects, the human trickery — that's irreplaceable. Players can smell a machine-made game, and they don't come back.
Where this was said
At 46:35 · chapter starts 43:20
Knight is careful to say that NYT Games was already growing before Wordle arrived — the acquisition was an accelerant, not the engine. The key metrics the team watches are day-1, day-7, and day-30 retention: what percentage of new users come back tomorrow, next week, next month? These numbers predict growth and longevity better than any other signal. New games are tested in Canada, geo-locked to the web, and surfaced through the Wordle hamburger menu so they reach a real but contained audience without running away from the team. Games that can't move retention even after solve-rate improvements are cut. Wordle's secret: a 90%-plus solve rate. Players feel accomplished, and they come back. Connections, by contrast, has a volatile solve rate — often low — but excellent retention because even failing is satisfying.
More than 90% of players who start a game of Wordle successfully solve it, giving it one of the highest solve rates in the NYT Games portfolio.
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Copy days of Discord chat history, paste it into ChatGPT, and ask it to list recurring pain points. The ones that come up most often are your best product bets.
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Directory listings are a powerful but underrated growth channel — but only if your product is genuinely interesting enough to earn the click. AI products have a natural advantage here because they're easy to package in a compelling, clickable way.
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